


Alone at the Table

by nancynotruth



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: And as we all know, Angst, Angst and Feels, Ben Hargreeves Deserves Better, Ben Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Bittersweet Ending, Featuring the Hargreeves' family's silent dinners, Gen, He gets one..., Heavy Angst, I actually made myself cry writing this, I'm so sorry Ben, the major character death is Ben
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-28
Updated: 2020-09-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:41:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26693119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nancynotruth/pseuds/nancynotruth
Summary: Ben tiptoed down the stairs, because he'd only been dead a little over a week and he hadn't yet broken the habit. He sat down at the table and closed his eyes, so he wouldn't see his body parts sticking out of the chair like a bad computer glitch. And he imagined that he wasn't alone.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Everyone, Ben Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 2
Kudos: 33





	Alone at the Table

Ben tiptoed down the stairs, because he hadn’t yet broken the habit.

He had spent his entire life being quiet. When they were young, he whispered so much that Four had to repeat everything he said in a louder voice. The words _speak up_ were directed at him so much, he used to pretend they were his name. Back when he didn’t have a name, and he only had the vague idea of what a name was, just that it was something that normal people were called.

Now, he wished more than anything for someone to tell him to _speak up_. For Klaus to repeat after him. For Luther to call him a baby, like he used to whenever Ben wouldn’t raise his voice. He wanted an elocution demonstration from Allison, whose voice was so important. He would’ve even been okay with her look of disappointment every time he messed up.

And he messed up a lot. Father would add extra training hours every time he didn’t speak loudly enough. The next morning, after he’d trained straight through the night, Diego would haltingly tell him to picture the word in his head. And Ben would try, but his voice always came out rasping and soft.

Only Klaus and Vanya knew the real reason. That every time the Horror burst out of his chest, he screamed until his voice ground down to a tiny whisper. Sometimes, it felt like the creature inside him was screaming, too. Neither of them had signed up for this. Neither of them wanted to be seen. Neither of them wanted to be heard. 

Especially not late at night, sneaking down the staircase when the rest of the household was asleep and Mom was hooked up to her charging port.

So Ben still tiptoed. He breathed—or pretended to breathe, he wasn’t sure—through his mouth, so his nose wouldn’t make those little huffs of air that could so easily give him away. He pulled up his hood and thrust his hands into his pockets, his leather jacket and his sweatshirt hiding the roiling under his epidermis.

Of course, it wouldn’t matter if Ben ran down the stairs screaming, with the horror bursting out of his stomach. Klaus had drunk himself into a torpor, and Ben had been dead for just over a week. Everything he did now was silent.

Dad hadn’t yet reprogrammed Mom to remember Ben’s death, so Ben’s chair was still at the table. He tried to pull it out, and his hands passed straight through, like the chair was a hologram. Like _Ben_ was a hologram.

He stamped his foot in frustration, and it went straight thorough the floor. Silent. Painless. Ben looked away from where his ankle poked through the floorboards, and tried not to think about how he couldn’t even feel sick anymore.

He closed his eyes as he walked through his chair, and slowly oriented his body into a semi-sitting position. He hadn’t quite gotten the hang of the whole ghost thing yet, looking like he was sitting on top of something when all he could feel was _nothing_. He knew he was probably sticking out of the back of the chair like a computer glitch.

So Ben kept his eyes closed, and sat perfectly still while his siblings joined him at the table and Mom served their food. His Dad was here, too, but Ben didn’t really care. It was the first time he had seen all of his siblings together since yesterday evening, and it was nice to be with them at the table.

Tonight was one of their perfectly silent dinners, no recorded voice telling him how to recover from a mountaineering accident or how to make a garrote out of his boot laces. He couldn’t hear his siblings breathing, or cutlery scraping on their plates, because he’d been so near the shooting that his hearing had gone temporarily offline.

That was the only reason.

He wasn’t hungry, not because he couldn’t eat anymore and his hands went straight through the bowl of food that Mom still put at his chair every night because she was a _robot_ and her programming hadn’t been changed to recognize the fact that he was dead, he was _dead,_ and he’d never eat again…

No. That wasn’t the reason he wasn’t hungry. It was because he’d just killed eighteen men, and the smell of their blood still choked up his nostrils because _damnit,_ he’d survived and he could still smell.

He wasn’t hungry, so when Dad wasn’t looking he’d scraped half the food off his plate and onto Five’s. Luther had pursed his lips and rolled his eyes, but Five had shot Ben the barest hint of a smile. Ben looked down to hide his own smile—he’d made a difference, he’d helped—as Five went back to shoveling food into his mouth like he hadn’t eaten a full meal in forty years. 

Across the table, Allison and Luther were having a conversation with their eyes. Ben wasn’t jealous. He was happy that they had each other. That Allison hadn’t pulled away and started spending all her time in her room, looking through open-call auditions and Los Angeles apartment listings. That Luther didn’t lay on his bed after training until he couldn’t move, tears streaming down his cheeks and into his ears, mumbling _I’m the leader_ and _could’ve saved him_.

Allison and Luther were having a conversation with their eyes, and they were smiling. They were alright.

Klaus was looking down, probably rolling a blunt or something equally ridiculous. His food, like Ben’s, lay untouched. Maybe tonight, when Klaus was coming down from his high and Ben could finally get the sight of pulverized flesh out of his mind, they’d sneak out to Griddy’s. Maybe Five would blink them out, one by one, just like he used to. Just like he _still did,_ Ben reminded himself. Five was still here, and so was he.

Diego had scraped his plate clean, and was twisting his knife between his fingers. From the corner of the room, Mom aimed her vapid smile at him. He beamed. That smile had always meant so much more to Diego than it did to Ben.

Right now, Ben would give anything to have that smile directed at him again.

He gritted his teeth and looked down the table at Vanya. He didn’t get to see Vanya much, anymore. Training kept them apart, and she had stopped coming into his room when she heard him crying at night. Even Vanya only had so much empathy, and Ben didn’t blame her. She had her own struggles to deal with. But she still gave him a tiny smile, and looked him in the eyes, and saw him.

They were together, they were silent, and they were real.

Ben didn’t know how long he sat there, eyes closed, his family around him. Just that when he opened them, he was alone. And he’d always been alone.

He remembered the feeling of a tear slipping down his cheek.

He remembered the feeling of loss.

He was a memory, now. Even to himself.

Years later, he looked at Vanya and wondered which was worse, being a memory or losing your memory. But when he stood in the hallway—he could make it look like his feet were touching the floor, now—with a horrible ringing in his ears and three of his siblings unconscious on the ground, he knew.

The worst thing for people like him and Vanya, who loved and lost so deeply, was remembering.

He walked down the staircase in Vanya’s mind, not bothering to muffle his steps. He’d come a long way from the only just-dead ghost who didn’t want to be heard.

When he sat in frond of Vanya, she looked him straight in the eyes. Just like Diego had, just like Klaus. He took her hand, and it was cold, but he could _feel._

“You’re my sister,” he told her, and through her tears she gave him the same tiny smile he’d imagined on her younger self’s face all those years ago. She looked him in the eyes, and saw him. He might have been a memory, swimming through stolen years of gravy, but he was making a difference. He was helping. He was finally making a sound.

“You aren’t alone at the table anymore, Vanya.”

_And neither am I._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Please let me know if you liked this, because writing it emotionally wrecked me and I crave validation. Kudos/Comments are chicken soup for this author's soul. 
> 
> Love you all. Stay safe.


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